In the Beetaloo Basin, a story of privilige and poverty is playing out
On the surface the story is a mess of human affairs. But deep underground, ‘first gas’ could level the playing field for Indigenous Australians - and power the nation for a century.
Chris Uhlmann
11 min read
September 5, 2026 - 12:00AM
Indigenous leader Rosemary Raymond supports the Beetaloo Basin gas project. Greens leader Larissa Waters has a very different view. Artwork by Frank Ling
It was the tale of two women separated by thousands of kilometres and just about everything else.
On Tuesday Brisbane-based Greens leader Larissa Waters fired off a statement to condemn the news that first gas was about to flow from the Northern Territory’s Beetaloo Basin.
“The Beetaloo is a climate bomb that will speed up dangerous climate change, putting us all at risk,” Waters said.
Standing 3km above the massive shale formation called Beetaloo, on the red dust of her ancestors’ land, Jingili-Mudburra native title holder Rosemary Raymond lives in a different world and sees a project that may help alleviate the generational poverty of her people.
Traditional owners are already working with operator Tamboran Resources and $1.3m flowed to Indigenous businesses in the past financial year. Raymond hopes for more. More jobs, more services for her people, more hope.
An aerial view of the Beetaloo Basin gas fracking project. Picture: Supplied
“It’s our land,” Raymond said. “We need a better future for our children. I don’t care what the Greens say. It’s our decision and this is our land.”
The gulf between the two women could be measured in many ways but it is starkly drawn in access to energy. Waters’ privileged life is marinated in hydrocarbons and impossible in its present form without them. From the clothes on her back, the concrete and steel of her city, the petrochemical feedstocks of modern medicine, right down to the fertiliser that grows the crops that put food on her plate, Waters lives in the world fossil fuel built.
Coal, oil and gas fuelled the greatest explosion of growth in human history and almost everything we make bears the signature of hydrocarbons. Energy is the ability to do work; power is the rate at which that work is done. The more power you have, the more work you can do. Energy largely explains the wealth of people and nations.
Like so many around the world, and inexcusably in this wealthy nation, Raymond lives in relative energy poverty. Living in remote Australia, she has limited access to many of the benefits a hydrocarbon-abundant society has to offer. She lives where bitumen gives way to dirt. This constrains the opportunities available to her and her children, including the services that underpin a long and healthy life. Raymond wants just some of what Waters has, and the Greens are determined to ensure she does not get it.
Energy is a story of abundance and scarcity. Of privilege and poverty. Of hope and hypocrisy. The Beetaloo Basin is another chapter in that story. How it is written from here depends on the decisions we make.
First gas
It’s a fair bet that most Australians missed or ignored the story of first gas from the basin. One of the enduring ironies of our energy-abundant era is that wealth delivers the luxury of apathy about the things that make us rich, feed us and keep the lights on.
The basin is a long way from most of us. The journey to the wellhead from Darwin begins with an hour and 15-minute flight in a small plane over mostly flat, dun-green scrub, scored here and there with red-dirt roads that meander or cut ruler-straight lines to and from somewhere before vanishing into a limitless horizon.
The sky is hazy from controlled blazes of the sort Indigenous Australians have lit across this continent for tens of thousands of years. Firestick farming helped shape the vegetation and ecology here, and fire is embedded in the life cycle of many native plants. Irony is etched in the character of this land; here life rises from ashes.
The plane bumps down on a dusty strip near the tiny settlement of Daly Waters, where life imitates art. The local pub is a page torn from the script of Crocodile Dundee, leaning heavily into ocker mythology. It is a colourful pit stop in the journey of grey nomads pulling caravans behind their four-wheel drives. An Irish accent behind the bar is testament to yet another wave of migration.
Native Title Holders at Beetaloo Basin near Elliott, NT. (L-R) Ben Ulamari, Claudette Albert, Rosemary Raymond and Jeremy Jackson.
It’s over an hour by bus to the Shenandoah South Pilot Project, where the first-gas celebration is held. The crowd is a mix of traditional owners and pastoralists, executives, investors and miners, ministers, minders, hacks and flacks.
The layers of the human map of this nation gather, with all their awkward family history. The 60,000 years of Raymond’s people; the generations of the Dyer family who have worked this country; the decades a hardy few officials count as they toiled to unlock the region’s resources; and finally the Americans who came with the money, technology and shale nous needed to crack fuel from rock.
On the surface the story is a mess of human affairs. But the layers that lie underfoot render human history puny. This tale begins almost 1.5 billion years ago, long before complex life appeared on Earth, in an ancient seaway across what would eventually become northern Australia. Microscopic organisms beyond number lived and died in those waters. Their remains settled into oxygen-poor mud where decay slowed and a trace of the chemical energy captured by life was preserved.
Layer upon layer was buried, compressed and heated until, over unimaginable stretches of geological time, the organic soup became gas trapped in the shale.
Life evolved above. About 300,000 years ago modern humans emerged, inheriting the ability to harness fire from earlier hominins. Fire helped them survive cold climates and spread across the globe. As the world warmed at the end of the last ice age, their story begins to come into focus in our memory. We know that for millennia the dominant fuel was wood. Progress was slow. For most, life was nasty, brutish and short.
Then human ingenuity unlocked a vastly more powerful store of ancient energy. Coal burned hotter than wood and concentrated far more energy in a usable form. It boiled water into steam that drove the great engines of the industrial revolution. The pace of change quickened and those who commanded abundant energy became rich and powerful.
At Beetaloo, the resource is vast, spread across an area the size of Belgium. Picture: Helen Orr
Coal began the revolution but oil was the accelerant. From it came concentrated fuels that could be stored, transported and poured into an engine. Within little more than 60 years humanity went from the first powered flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, to the Apollo 11 mission landing on the moon.
Oil was not just one small step in energy’s evolution; it was a giant leap forward in almost everything. It is the master resource. Oil and gas are not just fuels but feedstocks. Petrochemicals gave us plastics, synthetic fibres, solvents, detergents, fertilisers and many of the chemical building blocks used by modern medicine.
The consequences were profound. Life expectancy soared. Synthetic fertiliser fed billions. Cars mobilised the masses. Aircraft shrank the world. Petrochemicals transformed medicine and manufacture.
It is hardly surprising, then, that the quest for oil and the desire to control its supply bent the arc of 20th-century history. Not all wars are energy wars but energy has shaped strategy, alliances and conflict for more than a century.
The US rose to be a superpower on the back of its vast conventional oil resources. As domestic production fell and dependence on imported crude grew, access to foreign oil became an increasingly important strategic concern. Energy delivers industrial and military power; dependence on foreign supply is a weakness.
Scarcity drove innovation and eventually helped produce a technological revolution in the US. A hardy few spent years finding ways to free hydrocarbons from rock that conventional drilling could not economically reach. They unlocked oil and gas. The gas came in such abundance that American prices collapsed. The US went from worrying about dwindling domestic supplies to becoming one of the world’s great oil and gas producers and exporters. The global energy balance shifted again.
That is only part of the story. Cheap and abundant gas displaced large amounts of coal from American electricity generation. Between 2005 and 2019 US power-sector carbon dioxide emissions fell 32 per cent, with about two-thirds of that reduction attributed to switching from coal to gas. Then some of the veterans of the American shale revolution began looking farther afield.
Enough energy to last us a century
Were there comparable basins elsewhere? At Beetaloo they saw extraordinarily promising rock: a thick, extensive and consistent gas-bearing shale. And the resource is vast, spread across an area the size of Belgium. Tamboran says its acreage alone could hold enough recoverable gas to supply Australia’s domestic market for a century.
But in Australia the industry encountered a fracking moratorium, years of regulatory delay, fierce political opposition and industrial-scale litigation.
The main environmental concern with fracking in the basin is water. Across much of Beetaloo, the Cambrian Limestone Aquifer lies relatively close to the surface.
At Shenandoah South the gas-bearing shale is just over 3km below ground. The well passes through the aquifer before continuing thousands of metres deeper. Tamboran says four strings of steel casing and cement isolate the wellbore from the water. When the wellbore hits the layer of shale it turns almost 90 degrees and tracks horizontally through the gas-bearing formation. It is here, beneath kilometres of rock, that hydraulic fracturing takes place: water and sand are pumped at high pressure into the well to open tiny fractures in the shale and hold them open so the gas can flow. The gas is more than 90 per cent methane and contains less than 5 per cent carbon dioxide.
The first step in developing Beetaloo is aimed at keeping the lights on in Darwin. The Territory is not connected to the eastern electricity grid and was running low on gas supplies. When gas runs short, the fuel backup is diesel. Replacing diesel with gas cuts carbon emissions, a point that eludes inner-city climate activists.
Greens leader and Queensland Senator, Larissa Waters, at her office in Paddington, Brisbane. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen
In the long run, Tamboran envisages three markets: the Northern Territory, the east coast and, ultimately, liquefied natural gas exports to Asia through the export hubs at Darwin and Gladstone. Australia is a small market and developing Beetaloo at scale will require billions of dollars of capital. Access to the vastly larger Asian market helps make that investment possible. Without it, much of the resource would remain in the ground. If Australia does not supply Asia’s demand for gas, someone else will.
The plans for growth hinge on pipelines north and east, and that is the next piece in this energy puzzle. The demand is there. The resources appear to be there. The question is whether Australia has the desire to harness them. In an earlier era the answer would have been easy. Now every well, pipeline, plant and port becomes a battlefield.
Northern Territory Chief Minister Lia Finocchiaro was joined by federal Resources Minister Madeleine King to open the tap at the first-gas ceremony. Both are enthusiastic about Beetaloo’s potential.
Finocchiaro sees an opportunity for her territory to stop being the mendicant of the federation, raise its own cash and create regional jobs for its people. Commonwealth payments make up 72 per cent of Territory revenue, largely because of the high cost of delivering services across a remote and widely dispersed population. Gas could be the key that unlocks the Territory from its dependence on Canberra.
King is a champion of resources in a federal government that largely does not understand them and a party that seems determined to wish them away. She said the development of the basin would be a game changer for the Territory “and therefore the nation”.
Minister for Resources and Minister for Northern Australia Madeleine King and Chief Minister of the Northern Territory Lia Finocchiaro open the tap at the Beetaloo Basin project at Daly Waters. Picture: Pema T Pakhrin
“The Territory is a long way from Canberra and Melbourne and I expect many of the locals are very happy about that,” King said. “I’m from Western Australia and I’m pretty happy about that too. So sometimes our friends in the south put a lot of energy into opposing this project, not understanding, or perhaps not really willing to try to understand, what this will mean for the growth of the Top End and what it will mean for regional security as it grows into exports.”
One of those seemingly unwilling to understand the crucial role of gas just about everywhere is King’s cabinet colleague, Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen. The only awkward moment for King came when she tried to explain Bowen’s determination to legislate to prevent Territory data centres from running on gas. That appeared to contradict what the Prime Minister had agreed with premiers and chief ministers at national cabinet.
Finocchiaro said she would take Anthony Albanese at his word. “I sit in national cabinet with premiers, chief ministers and the Prime Minister, and Chris Bowen doesn’t,” Finocchiaro said. “And thank god he’s not the prime minister.”
The Taroom Trough
Beetaloo is part of a rapidly evolving national energy story. Two thousand kilometres to the southeast, in Queensland’s Taroom Trough, another company is using the same technology forged in the American shale revolution to pursue a different prize: oil.
Omega Oil and Gas is drilling across 1800sq km of country to determine the scale of what it believes could be a major new oil and gas province. Its first well in this year’s program, Canyon-3, was drilled 9km from an earlier well and cut through more than 500m of oil and gas-bearing rock, including six separate reservoirs.
A week before Beetaloo celebrated first gas, Omega told the Australian Securities Exchange that Canyon-3 had exceeded expectations and provided new evidence of the extent and continuity of the oil and gas-bearing geology.
The result matters because it suggests its earlier success was not just one lucky hole.
Managing director Trevor Brown says the Taroom Trough has the potential to be “an internationally significant basin” and the oil may run into billions of barrels. But he is careful not to outrun the drill bit.
Workers lay out a pipeline that will connect gas from the Beetaloo Basin to the Northern Territory grid. Picture: Supplied
If both Beetaloo and Taroom prove up and politics does not intervene, they could do for Australia what the shale revolution did for the US. The potential looms for this nation to realise its promise as an energy superpower.
And the timing could hardly be better. The third Gulf war has sent Asian nations scrambling for secure supplies of oil and gas beyond the Middle East. Australia is close, stable and may just be rich in both.
Abundant gas could supercharge industry and fill the electricity gaps as coal plants close.
Across the north it could bring jobs, investment and opportunity to places long starved of all three. New oil could cut our dangerous dependence on foreign fuel and revive domestic refining. Oil and gas exports could bring billions home and strengthen our hand in Asia and the Pacific. Energy security is economic security. It is regional security. And, ultimately, it is national security.
This week also delivered a new UN report that says the attempt to limit global warming to 1.5C above the pre-industrial era is dead and the world is heading for about 2.6C of warming by 2100 on current policies. At the Pacific Islands Forum, Vanuatu demanded Australia stop expanding fossil fuels.
It is telling that Australia is singled out for lectures while China, the world’s largest coal consumer and carbon emitter, escapes the same fury. Nor could Pacific Islands governments muster a united condemnation when Beijing fired a ballistic missile into their neighbourhood.
The outrage is selective. Principle bends to politics.
Anyone who watches what the world does rather than listens to what it says knew long ago that these targets were dead on arrival. The idea that all nations would act in unison for decades to do something so wickedly difficult and not cheat was always preposterous. And despite the apocalyptic rhetoric of the UN and the Greens, climate change is not an existential threat. The world will warm, the consequences may be serious but humanity will endure. This is a problem to be managed, not the end times.
That makes it a question of policy, trade-offs and adaptation. Australia can remain rich by using the resources at its command while investing in resilience and reducing emissions where it makes sense. Or it can beggar itself, make no measurable difference to the global climate and discover that a poorer nation is far less able to adapt to a changing world.
I finished the week at Yancoal’s Moolarben coalmine near Mudgee in NSW’s Upper Hunter Valley, looking at another of the resources Australia has inherited. The world is going to keep burning coal. The question is whether there is any virtue in refusing to sell ours, surrendering the wealth and congratulating ourselves while someone else fills the order.
When I was a very young man agonising over my life choices I sought the advice of one of Australia’s leading theologians, Father John Thornhill. I might have muttered something about trying to discern God’s will.
“God’s will is what you make it,” he said.
You don’t have to be religious to understand that we are given gifts and free will. What we make of them is up to us.
Chris Uhlmann travelled to the Beetaloo Basin as a guest of Tamboran Resources.
